The paper describes an Icelandic pronunciation dictionary for use in a text-to- speech system for Icelandic. Procedures were implemented to create a consistent training set for grapheme-to-phoneme (g2p) conversion modeling, needed for automatic extensions of the dictionary. The experiments show a clear benefit of using clean data for training, both in terms of PER and in terms of categories of errors made by the g2p algorithm. The results of the dictionary processing were also used to create an initial version of an open source database for Icelandic speech applications. The scripts used in the experiments are available via our Github repository: https://github.com/cadia-lvl/SLT2018.

Jón and Anna Björk’s poster presentation will be at SLT on Friday, Dec. 21 between 10:00 and 12:00 PM. Here’s a sneak peek.

We hope to see you there. If you see Anna or Jón please stop by and say hello.

The cooperation between LVL and other leading icelandic organizations is increasing. Tomorrow Reykjavik University and Societas Scientiarum Islandica (Vísindafélag Íslendinga) are holding a seminar and panel discussion on the current progress and the future of implementing language technologies for Icelandic.

It will be held at Reykjavik University room M105. Hrafn Loftsson, of LVL, will be moderating the seminar starting at 13:30. It will consist of talks from a professor at University of Iceland, the chairman of Almannaromur, Jón Guðnason of LVL, and the director of Miðeindar ehf. Afterwards is the panel discussion.

We welcome everyone to attend the lively Saturday afternoon discussion!

This Friday is Researchers’ Night (Vísindavaka Rannís 2018). It is an all ages event on the 28th of September, 2018 from 16:30 – 22:00 at Laugardalshöllin, Reykjavik.

We will be there with Reykjavik University demonstrating the possibilities of speech with tech: evaluating collected speech data (Eyra), testing the accuracy of an automatic speech recognizer(ASR) – https://tal.ru.is, listening to a text-to-speech synthesizer, and telling your phone to read the news to you. Come try out the state-of-the-art in Icelandic speech technology, and tell us what you think!

For the students of Reykjavik University or summer exchange students, we now have a list of student projects available. They are on https://lvl.ru.is/student-projects/ or available from the Menu of the LVL website as Student Projects. They range from straight forward to difficult and are suitable for undergraduate final projects, Masters students, and PhD students. If you want to work on a one, please contact the people listed in the contact column, and they can give you more details to get you started. We look forward to hearing from you!

The Nordic association of the hard of hearing (Nordiska Hörselskadades Samarbetskommitté, NHS) had a seminar at Hotel Selfoss last week. On Friday, Anna gave a talk there on how language technology might assist people hard of hearing to communicate and access information in a predominately hearing world. Automatic transcription of live communication and automatic caption of video material is already working for English and some other languages, and the Nordic participants of the seminar were eager to see this technology advance in their languages. At LVL, we are working on open ASR systems, making the development of technology like this possible for Icelandic.

The rest of the slides can be viewed by selecting the first slide below.

This week LVL sat down with Mycroft to discuss the possibilities of collaborating and working together to bring more speech technology to Iceland. We discussed using Mozilla’s Common Voice to bring about another open source Icelandic speech dataset, and possibly an Icelandic voice assistant. The Mozilla project requires just 5,000 phrases which anyone can contribute, even you!

This Thursday, Anna will be representing the LVL group at The Future of the Icelandic Language in New York. It is being hosted as part of the “100 ára fullveldi Íslands” (trans. 100 years of of sovereignty in Iceland) celebration. Anna will be a panelist during the “The Icelandic Language and Technology” discussion along with international leading figures in the language and technology community.